After the ﬂood
University researchers present their
findings from the historic October 2015
S.C. ﬂooding

Also in this issue
• Buying a bride
• Recognizing homelessness
• Rewiring the Caribbean

pg. 16
pg. 20

pg. 18
OFFICE OF RESEARCH
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA
President Harris Pastides
Vice President for Research Prakash Nagarkatti
Research Communications Manager Elizabeth Renedo
Director of University Communications and Marketing/
Chief Communications Officer Wes Hickman

pg. 14

Office of Communications and Marketing
Creative Director Bob Wertz
Editor Chris Horn
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Contributing Writers Craig Brandhorst, Chris Horn,
Page Ivey, Liz McCarthy, Steven Powell
Photographer Kim Truett
Cover Artist Maria Fabrizio, â&#x20AC;&#x2122;08 B.F.A.
Website sc.edu/vpresearch
To comment on an item in Breakthrough or to
suggest an idea for a future issue, contact the
University of South Carolinaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Office of Research
at 803-777-5458 or email vpr@mailbox.sc.edu.
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or employment opportunities or decisions for qualified persons on the
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The University of South Carolina is committed to sustainability in all facets of
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pg. 8

IN THIS ISSUE
4/

In brief

8/

After the flood University researchers present their

findings from the historic October 2015 S.C. ﬂooding

14 /

Q&A with Julius Fridriksson Arnold School of

16 /

Buying a bride A closer look at the matrimonial
practice that helped build the United States

18 /

A healthy new start An international health expert
launches Carolina Survivors Clinic and a ‘garden
of healing’

Public Health

20 /

The art of science Art professor Dawn Hunter
opens a window on the work of 19th century
Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal.

22 /

Recognizing homelessness A data-driven glimpse

23 /

Rewiring the Caribbean A geography professor’s

24 /

In the pipeline The Center for Predictive Mainte-

at psychology professor Bret Kloos’ research on
homelessness in Richland County

search for solutions to the Caribbean’s high electricity costs

nance in the College of Engineering and Computing
launches a new chapter

Video at sc.edu/breakthrough

Cover illustration by Maria Fabrizio

Prakash Nagarkatti, Ph.D.
Vice President for Research
University of South Carolina
www.sc.edu/vpresearch

Last October, South Carolina experienced one of the worst natural disasters in the state’s
long history as floodwaters engulfed urban, suburban and rural communities from the
Midlands to the Lowcountry.
As the research leader for the Palmetto State’s flagship university, I felt a duty to
empower USC’s outstanding faculty to gather the perishable data that would provide
them the insight necessary to understand and devise strategies to improve flood impacts.
As waters receded, my colleagues and I designed and initiated a flood research effort that,
in two weeks’ time, put USC research dollars into the hands of the faculty members best
equipped to gather a wide variety of valuable time-sensitive data on subjects such as flood
experiences, infrastructure, communications and river systems, among others.
In this issue of Breakthrough, we are proud to highlight USC faculty research on the
thousand-year flood of October 2015. Here, we provide a broad cross-section of six flood
research projects from engineering, technology, biology, human health, economics and
the humanities.
But this is just a small sampling. More than 80 USC faculty members undertook 34
flood research projects — far too many to fit within these pages. I encourage all readers
with an interest in flood recovery and research to visit sc.edu/vpresearch to read detailed
summaries of all of the S.C. Flood Research Initiative projects. Just expand the
“Internal Funding and Awards” button, and look under “Opportunities for Faculty,”
where you’ll find complete information on the 2015 S.C. Flood Research Initiative
projects.

2 / Breakthrough

Engineering undergraduates Celin Alvarado and Adam
Jordan conduct research on mixing in a stirred-tank
reactor in the Unit Operations Laboratory.

Fall 2016 / 3

In brief

THE FAST CASUAL CONUNDRUM
Dieters looking to cut calories may believe it’s best to pick a fast casual
restaurant over a fast food chain, but research from the Arnold School
of Public Health shows that might not be the best choice.
Entrees at fast casual restaurants — a category that includes
restaurants such as Chipotle and Panera Bread — have a higher average
calorie count than fast food establishments, such as a McDonald’s or
Bojangles’.
In research published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition
and Dietetics this spring, researchers Danielle Schoffman, Brie TurnerMcGrievy and others showed that an average meal at a fast casual
restaurant is 200 calories higher than a typical fast food meal. The fast
casual restaurants also have more high-calorie options on their menus
than the fast food restaurants.
The researchers analyzed the menus at 34 fast food and 28 fast
casual restaurants, finding that fast casual entrees had an average of
760 calories per entree compared with 561 for fast food entrees. Also,
a greater proportion of fast casual restaurant entrees exceeded the
median of 640 calories per entree. Because there are so many ways
to customize meals at both restaurants, the researchers counted the
calories of what is considered a standard order. For example, with
salads they used ranch dressing because it is the most popular.
“We were surprised that there were higher calories at fast casual
restaurants, but one of the main takeaways from the paper is that there
are a lot of high-calorie options at both kinds of restaurants,” said
Schoffman, the lead researcher.
The researchers hope further studies will look at topics including
nutritional values and other health benefits of certain foods. It’s possible, for example, that fast casual restaurants might have higher diet
quality, less sodium or more fiber.
“A burger on a white bun may have fewer calories, but when you’re
talking about cancer prevention or other chronic diseases, you have
to look beyond calories,” Turner-McGrievy said. “We don’t want the
message to be, ‘Go eat hamburgers and don’t eat guacamole and beans
and brown rice.’”

4 / Breakthrough

BLOOD OF THE VINE
IS WINE GOD’S GIFT TO MANKIND OR A DANGEROUS TEMPTATION LEADING HUMANITY INTO SIN?
In medieval Europe, both beliefs existed side by side. And it’s that apparent contradiction that helps explain how Christine Ames, whose primary
research area is Inquisition history, came to explore the history of wine.
For Ames, both topics are vehicles for exploring the question that drives
all of her scholarly work — how Christianity changes over time.
Her shift to wine, she says, came from realizing that “wine is an agent
of change.” It changes the value of the land on which it’s produced, “it
changes people’s behavior, it changes people’s status,” says Ames, an

NO RESERVATIONS
STUDENT BUILDS A FOUR-STAR HOTEL
FOR GARDEN GUESTS
Andrew O’Flaherty has built his version of a luxury hotel at the
Sustainable Carolina garden outside the Green Quad residence
hall, and he’s hoping skinks, lizards, ladybugs and bumblebees
will think of it as a home away from home.
Those are the organisms that will help keep the garden free
from unwanted pests, such as roaches, mice, mosquitoes and
aphids. It’s an eco-friendly way to make the garden pest-free.

associate professor in the Department of History. All of these themes
will be explored in her forthcoming book, “Blood of the Vine: A Religious
History of Wine in Medieval Europe.”
In the Middle Ages, people would donate land to vineyards owned by
bishops and monasteries in order to improve their earthly status or the
status of their souls. “What we see is that people are really explicit: ‘I am
giving you this to save my soul, or to save my mother’s soul, or because I
want to join your monastery,’” Ames says.
People made all sorts of deals with the church, Ames says, “but what is
different about wine is that wine is always about the future. You see this
in the language of the donations. ‘The vineyard now is desiccated, but
we will make it ﬂorid again.’ ‘Here’s the vineyard; it will turn into this sort

“The goal is attract pollinators and other beneficial insects

of wine.’ With wine, you have these particular resonances.”

while repelling pests,” says O’Flaherty, a senior environmental

Ames is especially interested in how an idea can embody contradictions,

science major and assistant manager of the Sustainable Carolina garden. “The plants are not getting eaten as much, and
we can do less artificial pest-management. The goal is to
make the garden as self-sustaining as possible.”
O’Flaherty used old pallets to create a first ﬂoor of tiles and
other items that would provide cool shade for skinks and
lizards that will reduce the number of mice, cockroaches and
mosquitoes. The second ﬂoor has things that spiders like —
a pair of old shoes — and ladybug havens of decaying plant
material. For the bees, there’s bamboo.
“The lizards really help with mosquitoes, which are a big
nuisance for the gardeners,” he says.
For O’Flaherty, the experiment in creating natural, selfsustaining pest control is all part of using nature to help nur-

and how it can evolve over time. Take, for example, the conception of
wine as both a gift from God and as a dangerous temptation.
“This is something that theologians and churchmen talked about all the
time,” Ames says. The church itself was a major wine producer, but at the
same time “you have these churchmen saying that wine changes your
spiritual status in a bad way because it makes you drunk.”
Ames’ shift to researching wine has taken her into entirely new scholarly
areas.
“So often in history we are compartmentalized,” Ames says. “What I love
about this is that it’s everything — science, environment, theology, society, business, capitalism, economy.”
It’s also a more positive subject than her usual Inquisition stomping
grounds.

ture things that humans want. “The concept of permaculture

“Inquisition is fascinating, but in some ways it is fascinating for all the

is to find ways to minimize my impact on the environment,”

wrong reasons,” she says. “Wine is just a different eye on human behav-

O’Flaherty says. “And it incorporates more life into the area.”

ior and human experience that is more cheerful.”

Fall 2016 / 5

In brief

THE ION CHANNEL
Aaron Provence’s doctoral research is focused on a very specific disorder — overactive bladder
— but he hopes the scientific insight he’s gaining in the College of Pharmacy will have a broad
medical impact.
“Statistics say that it aﬀects about 17 percent of the Western population,” says Provence. “And
they say it’s underreported as well.”
That works out to well over 50 million people in the U.S. dealing with overactive bladder, which
becomes more prevalent with age and sometimes forces the elderly to move into nursing homes.
Provence is studying retigabine, a medication approved in the U.S. as an anticonvulsive that has
the side eﬀect of causing retention of urine. Working in pharmacy professor Georgi Petkov’s lab,
Provence has been researching the drug’s eﬀects on a fundamental cog in the bio-machinery of a
bladder: the ion channel.
An ion channel is a collection of proteins that form a tiny tube that ﬂoats in a cell’s membrane,
the barrier between the cell’s contents and the rest of the world. One end of the tube is inside
the cell and the other faces outward.
Petkov and Provence have shown that a particular subtype of ion channel, Kv7, is an important part of bladder
function and activity. The drug retigabine makes the Kv7

SCHEMATIC DIAGRAM OF AN ION CHANNEL

ion channel more susceptible to opening, and Provence
is determining how many and in what pattern the cells in
bladder tissue produce the Kv7 ion channels that go into
their membranes.
“We want to know how the expression pattern is diﬀerent from other tissue systems,” Provence says. “That
way we can gear the drug discovery eﬀorts to make a
more specific therapeutic drug, so that you can target
the bladder with minimum collateral eﬀects elsewhere.”
Provence received a SPARC grant from the Office of
the Vice President for Research, which led to a threeyear NIH fellowship. He’s planning to continue studying
ion channels after completing his doctoral studies
at Carolina.
“The science can be applied to other conditions, like

“The research shows how exercise can help cancer
survivors with quality of life,” she says, “and in this

trouble getting even a modest dose. And that’s partic-

partnership with the American Cancer Society, we hope

ularly true of cancer survivors, who typically emerge as

to show how community-based organizations will be

survivors after physically grueling treatment.

able to implement the program.”

Pinto’s upcoming study, dubbed Moving Forward
Together III, will pair new breast cancer survivors with
fellow survivors, who will act as coaches and mentors.
Through weekly telephone calls, the mentor and mentee
will develop a 12-week exercise program.
Pinto led a pilot study in Rhode Island before
coming to Carolina in 2014, and the early results showed
how eﬀective having a telephone mentor was
in getting cancer survivors on an exercise
regimen.

Fall
7
Fall 2016
2016 /
/7

Front & Center

AFTER THE FLOOD
South Carolina’s thousand-year rainfall event and catastrophic flooding in October 2015 caused several deaths,
scores of dam breaches, extensive property damage, drinking water contamination and agricultural loss.
Immediately after the catastrophe, the Office of the Vice President for Research created internal funding
opportunities to support relevant faculty research. Thirty-four projects, led by more than 80 faculty researchers, were funded, and reports from each project were presented in November at the S.C. Floods Conference.
Here are six stories from a cross-section of the projects.

TWEETS AND POSTS
Measuring social media’s effectiveness during and after the flood
In their personal experiences in Columbia during last October’s flooding, the Arnold School of Public
Health’s Heather Brandt and Brie Turner-McGrievy were struck by how well many individuals worked
together in responding to the disaster.
“When you woke up on Sunday morning during the flooding here, people were in the boats that they had
unhooked from their own trailers, and were off rescuing people. These were citizens doing that,” Brandt says.
“Within 24 hours, huge teams of self-organized neighbors had gone into flooded homes and said, ‘We have to
get this drywall out of your house because mold sets in within a very short period of time.’”
Five days of incessant downpours had struck the Palmetto State hard, and South Carolinians responded
with months of highly orchestrated rescue, repair and recovery operations, with an almost preternatural
collective sense for finding those who needed help most.
That level of self-organization, Brandt and Turner-McGrievy hypothesized, probably had some roots
in social media, a tool employed by emergency responders, government agencies, nonprofit groups, media
and everyday citizens during the storm and its aftermath. But when they organized a team to document
and analyze the social media response to the flooding, they found that, like the flood itself, its volume was
overwhelming.
“The sheer number of tweets and Facebook posts would break a computer,” Brandt says.
So they scaled back their approach, but even when they focused solely on the Twitter platform, restricted
the scope to Midlands tweets, considered tweets only from a limited number of hashtags and included just
one in every 10 in the analysis, the team still had thousands more tweets to consider.
The heft of that dataset, representing just a sliver of all of the social media response, underscored the
amount of engagement that online platforms supported during the crisis. In the preliminary stages of coding
the data, the team recognized just how much value social media brought to many facets of the recovery.

8 / Breakthrough

Social media was a key part of informing the community about the forecasts concerning the
approach and ongoing severity of the rainfall, which were remarkable in their accuracy, they found.
Social media was integral in organizing volunteering, FEMA assistance, resource distribution, cleanup
and fundraising. It also played an important part in helping people understand road conditions and
avoid danger while traveling.
As Brandt and Turner-McGrievy work through the data, they’re identifying organizations that
exhibited highly effective use of social media during the flooding. One of the most prominent is the
S.C. Emergency Management Division, which not only spread valuable information as it was needed,
but also helped refute misinformation (such as the erroneous notion that the Lake Murray dam was at
risk) as it arose on social media channels.
Looking at the disaster through a public health lens, the team is working to develop a guide to
best practices along with documenting the social media response that accompanied last year’s disaster.
An avid Twitter aficionado herself, Brandt (@BlondeScientist) wants the success she saw firsthand to
propagate even further.
“My husband and I worked with the My Carolina Alumni Association during the recovery, and we
used Facebook and Twitter to guide donations and deliveries,” Brandt says. “We would find somebody
who said, ‘We need water, or we need this here.’ And I would reply and say we would be happy to help
you, can you direct message me a street address? And then we’d send a truck off with the supplies.
“That wouldn’t have happened maybe even five years ago. But it’s definitely happening now, so
let’s figure out how we can use it most effectively.”

CLOSING TOMORROW’S FLOODGATES
Destruction from the flooding was exacerbated by numerous dam and levee breaches in Lexington
and Richland counties.
Hanif Chaudhry, a civil engineering professor and associate dean of the College of Engineering
and Computing, is leading a team of researchers who aim to learn as much as they can from the dams
that failed. The researchers didn’t have a moment to spare once the rain stopped falling.
“It was very time-sensitive,” Chaudhry says. “When there is a failure, if they want to rebuild,
they will start right away with construction. Or if the dam is gone, the flow of water will change the
characteristics of the site. Or if some of the structure is left, it might present a hazard that the owner
will move in quickly to remove.”
Fortunately, Chaudhry and his engineering colleagues were already in the midst of two similar
studies of dam breaches, including a $3 million project funded by the National Science Foundation.
They had the manpower, training and laboratory equipment to quickly collect and analyze field
samples.
As part of the S.C. Floods Initiative funded by the university’s Office of the Vice President for
Research, Chaudhry’s team visited 14 sites with major damage to earthen levees, nine of which
involved total failures. Data collection included dimensional measurements and samples of the
materials present in the remnants of the structures.
The full analysis is still in progress, but the consequence
of overwhelming the capacity of a dam’s spillway to

Fall 2016 / 9

Front & Center

Breach at Old Mill Pond Dam

move excessive inflow to the downstream side of the embankment was clear. The result, Chaudhry says, was
“overtopping. That’s why most of the dams failed.”
He hopes that a complete analysis of the dam materials and the failure conditions might lead to design
recommendations that will mitigate damage in future flooding events. Moreover, hydrological modeling of
levee capacities at the point of failure should provide leaders with the capacity to better manage dams and
levees that are highly connected.
“Some of these dams were in series,” Chaudhry says. “So even if a given dam is in good shape, if an
upper dam fails, it comes down as a major wave, and if that cannot be handled it overtops, and then the next
one. So it can become a cascade. The dams are a system that we need to properly manage.”

STAGES OF LOSS AND RESILIENCE
Peter Duffy didn’t think words on paper could adequately convey the personal stories of loss, struggle and
resilience in the face of last fall’s flooding.
That’s why the USC theatre professor assembled a creative team to document the human suffering that
followed the flood.
“It’s one thing to know that 11 trillion gallons of water fell, and that it’s enough water to have quenched
the drought in California,” Duffy says. “But it’s another thing to hear what the flood has meant for people,
and for so many people it’s still going on. You can’t really convey that information to the public without
mediating it.”
Duffy led a team that interviewed three dozen Columbia residents hit hard by the disaster. The goal is
to use art to express those experiences to the rest of the community, with three performances planned for a
one-year commemoration of the flood in early October.
Working through transcribed and coded interviews, the team identified recurring themes, and Duffy
created composite characters who will take the stage in the upcoming performances. Dance and photography
will be part of the presentations.

10 / Breakthrough

Listening to people tell their stories revealed challenges the
researchers never anticipated.
“Some people had family come from out of state to help out
at the drop of a hat, but for others that wasn’t the case,” Duffy
says. “When you think about devastation of the flood, you’re
thinking about shoveling out mud, not necessarily another layer
of heartbreak on top of all that: having to deal with your family
not being disinterested but they’re just not here.”
Resilience is a recurring theme in the interviews, Duffy says.
“That’s been an important question: ‘What has gotten you
through this?’” he says. “And what does the city still need to
know?”
It won’t just be the city of Columbia that will get those
answers. The team is working with C&T, an England-based
theatre company, that is providing an online platform to create
a map highlighting similar projects around the world.
“We’re going to have a video of our play, which will be
pinned to South Carolina,” Duffy says. “There are lots of
similar projects happening around the world, looking at the
impacts of weather-related phenomena or climate change
related phenomena.
“Each performance will get pinned, so we’re creating a
global interactive map that uses arts-based methodologies to
share what’s happening globally.”

EBB AND FLOW
The flood as economic stimulus
First came the rain, then — in one tumultuous weekend —
the flooding. But the economic effects of last fall’s weather
event lingered long after.
Economists Doug Woodward and Joey Von Nessen at the
Darla Moore School of Business are using data from the S.C.
Department of Insurance and FEMA to better understand
how the flooding has affected the state’s economy.
Those organizations track money flowing into the state to
cover losses in agriculture, infrastructure and real estate, and the
researchers have seen, in their preliminary data, that significant
funding has arrived already. In terms of how those dollars might
still affect South Carolina’s economy, though, it’s a question of
when they will be spent.

SCHOOL SENTINELS
The S.C. ﬂoodwaters in October 2015 took away life and property,
but they also claimed something you can’t see as readily: peace of
mind.
Looking to assess impacts on some of the most psychologically
vulnerable victims of the disaster, College of Education faculty
member Jonathan Ohrt is leading a team of researchers focused
on the Richland and Lexington county school systems.
“In a natural disaster, schools tend to be a meeting place where
there are resources for students and their families as well,” Ohrt
says. “It’s just a place that people from the community have come
to rely on.”
Interviewing mental health professionals who were primarily school counselors, Ohrt’s team is documenting some of the
invisible long-term wounds that the ﬂooding imprinted on young
psyches.
“One student, whenever it rains, now gets very nervous because
she’s wondering if something bad is going to happen. ‘Are we
going to have to leave our house?’” Ohrt says. “Another counselor
is working with a family that still isn’t in a stable place. They’re
having to live in hotels — eight months after the event. Most of
us, I wouldn’t say we’ve forgotten, but we’ve moved on in many
ways.”
Members of Ohrt’s team, which included Department of Educational Studies colleagues Dodie Limberg and Ryan Carlson,
can readily empathize with students and understand the school
professionals helping them work through the situation, as well.
Two team members were school counselors and another was a
mental health counselor in K-12 systems before moving into academia. Coincidentally, all three were in central Florida (in different
locations) in 2005 and experienced Hurricane Wilma as it plowed
across the state.
“So we were kind of on the front lines before, and now we’re
looking at it from a researcher’s perspective as well,” Ohrt says.
“We all had some personal experience and actual work experience, which is one of the reasons we felt compelled to work on
the project.”

Fall 2016 / 11

Front & Center

North Inlet

The North Inlet, which connects the Atlantic Ocean to the
combined river output of the Pee Dee River basin in Winyah
Bay, is an estuary that has remained essentially untouched by
commercial human activity. Located just east of Georgetown,
S.C., its salt marsh has been the subject of meticulously detailed
study since 1981 by Baruch Institute scientists, who think that the
marine ecosystem has existed largely as it is now for hundreds,
and perhaps thousands, of years. That combination — a lack of
human inﬂuence and a meticulously detailed, 35-year record of
scientific study that has shown evidence of small perturbations
more recently — is almost unmatched globally, making the
North Inlet one of the world’s most important sentinels for
climate change study.

12 / Breakthrough

And there are plenty of places to spend.
“We see most of the damage in the Midlands and in
Charleston, but approximately half of all of South Carolina’s
46 counties had some sort of damage associated with the
flood,” Von Nessen says. “We are going to see unambiguous
losses in wealth as a result because there were a lot of uninsured
individuals who were affected that are not being reimbursed
for any damages. In many cases property is going unrepaired
altogether.”
The overall reduction in net wealth should, however, be
accompanied by a stimulus to the economy, the economists
believe, at least in the short run. After Hurricane Hugo in 1989,
for example, economic activity ramped up, Von Nessen says,
and he and Woodward are seeing some of the same in the early
data from the recent flooding.
“Usually in natural disasters like these, you see a stimulus
in two sectors. One is construction because damaged infrastructure is repaired and firms are brought in to do that work,” he
says. “But we also are tentatively seeing a boost in retail activity
as well, and a lot of that is housing-related goods and services.”
One specific example of the stimulus that they expect to see
in the final analysis is an increase in hiring.
“Looking at employment going forward, we’re expecting
about 2.7 percent employment growth — our current rate
now — to persist for the remainder of 2016 and into 2017,
and our anticipation is that the stimulus from the flood may
have as much as about a quarter to a half of a percentage point
bump on that baseline employment growth,” Von Nessen says.
“So we might expect perhaps 3 percent employment growth or
slightly more.”
That kind of economic bonus is nice in the short term,
but is expected to be followed by an eventual downside, Von
Nessen adds.
“It is a stimulus, but I think it would also be appropriate
to think of it as almost a mini-bubble,” he says. “Many of the
repairs are to damaged property that in some cases needed
renovations anyway, repairs that people may have been looking
to make down the road.
“So in a sense we see a borrowed future demand: you see
a bump up, a short-term stimulus, and then a bump down,
below the long-term averages, later on.”

WEATHERING THE STORM

“I guess the
good news for
North Inlet is,
it weathered
the storm.”

One of the most scientifically important marine ecosystems in the world got a
desalinizing wallop from last fall’s deluge: The creeks of the North Inlet of Winyah
Bay had low-tide salt concentrations drop to levels never before seen in 34 years of
measurement.
Since then, researchers at the Belle W. Baruch Institute for Marine and Coastal
Sciences have stepped up their monitoring of the North Inlet’s salt marsh, looking for
signs that the freshwater inundation might have fundamentally changed the estuary.
With funding from the S.C. Flood Initiative, the Baruch Marine Field Laboratory
has augmented existing monitoring stations and collected samples more frequently to
assess population changes in shrimp, crabs, fish, plankton and microbes dwelling in the
estuary. Baruch researchers found that, in the days and weeks soon after the flooding, the
altered estuary provided ideal conditions for some new visitors.
“We saw a number of species of fish and at least one shrimp that were records for North Inlet. They had
never been seen there before,” says Dennis Allen,, co-director of the field laboratory. “They include channel
catfish, white perch, white catfish, juvenile herrings and shads — organisms that are much more typical of
the rivers.”
The low-salinity waters at low tide that were hospitable to those more freshwater-oriented newcomers
did return to normal saltiness by mid-to-late October 2015, but the effects of the deluge were far from over,
Allen says. A wet El Niño winter followed, and several storm systems — though each released considerably
less precipitation than the original flooding event — caused salt levels to repeatedly crash, with extremely
low readings still being recorded into March 2016, some seven months after the initial deluge.
“Normally there wouldn’t have been much of a signal in terms of salinity depression,” Allen says, “but
because of the October flood the soils throughout the watershed were so saturated that almost anything
that hit the ground ran off.”
By April, salinity levels had returned to what scientists deemed normal, and they turned their focus to
the question of whether the flooding event might have caused long-term changes in the estuary. Early returns
indicate otherwise.
“Pending the full analysis, I think what we’ve seen here was a short and intense perturbation, but one
that was not enough to reset the system at a different level of organization or function,” Allen says. “So it
was a shock to the system, but it appears to have recovered, and at least is on its way to returning to what
we recognize as typical over the past 35 years.
“I guess the good news for North Inlet is, it weathered the storm.”

Fall 2016 / 13

HS

Health Sciences

First, can you define aphasia — in the simplest terms?
At the most basic level, aphasia is a communication problem. It’s
caused, almost always, by damage to the left hemisphere of the
brain. Certain areas of the brain are involved in processing speech

Q&A

and language, both comprehending and speech production. When
stroke affects these areas, it causes an impairment.
Also, it ranges from very mild — diﬃculty coming up with the right
words — to more severe forms where the person is almost mute
and/or has a diﬃcult time understanding other people when they
speak. There are different types of aphasia, and they are very much
related to what parts of the brain are affected.
This latest NIH grant involves several participating institutions.

With Julius Fridriksson

Can you break down the different studies this grant will fund at

Arnold School of Public Health

The grant includes four projects — two here, one at Johns Hopkins

USC?

and one at the University of California, Irvine. My main project here
at USC is focused on chronic patients who had a stroke a year or
more ago. We do an intensive work-up, look at all aspects of their
brain structure and function, and use both behavioral data and
brain imaging data to predict outcome. That takes eight weeks, and
we’ll do about 150 patients over five years — a very large patient

Earlier this year, a group of researchers led by Arnold

sample when it comes to aphasia treatment studies.

School of Public Health professor Julius Fridriksson

The other project at USC is with Chris Rorden, my main collabo-

received an $11 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study aphasia therapy. It was
the latest in a string of high-dollar research grants
Fridriksson has helped land in his ongoing effort
to understand and improve treatment for the
disorder, which adversely affects a patient’s
ability to use language, usually following
a stroke.

rator here. That’s a project to use all of the data we’re collecting.
When you include both behavioral data and neuroimaging data,
you’re talking about millions of data points. We’re trying to predict
outcome in the same way that Google uses algorithms to search
online except that we are searching our database to come up with
the best prognosis for treatment outcome.
The Johns Hopkins trial is a direct replication of a trial we have
ongoing in my lab and at MUSC. It deals with acute and sub-acute
patients — patients who just had a stroke — to see whether we can
use electrical brain stimulation to enhance the outcome of aphasia
treatment. The idea is to try to increase activation in areas of the
brain that we think are crucial for language. We hope we’re improving the atmosphere in that part of the brain for taking over certain
functions that were lost due to stroke. Our trial was funded by a
$5 million grant from the NIH four years go and will conclude next
March. The goal was 74 patients, and we’re now enrolling the 64th.
What are you hoping to accomplish as you take your research to
the next level?
We now understand that the brain is very plastic, that you can
sometimes recover years after brain injury. That recovery never

14 / Breakthrough

stops unless you start to become demented. That has changed

the right hemisphere takes over for the function that was lost.

our outlook. Therapy has not improved nearly as much as I

We think that the residual areas of the left hemisphere are

think it should, and that is because we have been limited by

what have to be retrained. What are those areas exactly? We

these very small studies. That’s why this big grant is so crucial.

have a very poor understanding of that.

It will give us much more reliable results as far as outcome and
who is a good candidate for therapy.

But your idea when it comes to aphasia therapy is that the

The other thing that has been huge for us is the improvement

focus does need to be on the left hemisphere as opposed

in neuroscience. Once you start understanding how the brain

to the right.

works, you’re better able to offer treatment.

Yes, but this is a great controversy. I’m one of the people that

The South is often referred to as the Stroke Belt. How does

thinks that the right hemisphere actually hinders improvement.

the incidence of stroke here affect your research?
Being here is fantastic for my research, but it’s fantastic for a
really bad reason. We have a lot of participants in our studies
because the stroke rate here is so high. Another unfortunate
distinction is that half of all strokes that happen in S.C. happen
to people who are under the age of 60. Most of the people
who get involved in our research are 65 and younger, and the
youngest are in their 20s, which is really bad. If you have a
stroke and you’re just 27 years old, you will live with a disability for the rest of your life. You might live another 50 years, but

It just does not seem capable of taking over lost language
functions. What remains of the left hemisphere after brain
injury — that’s what needs to take over for what was lost.
There’s already been some progress made in aphasia therapy, and your previous studies have been promising enough
to warrant greater and greater funding, including this latest
grant. In the long term, how might future stroke patients
benefit from the work you and your collaborators are
doing now?

your quality of life has just gone completely out the window —

When we find people who really won’t benefit from

and not just your quality of life but your family’s quality of life.

therapy, we want to focus on counseling. Counseling
is extremely beneficial, not just for the patient but

It can be difficult for someone unfamiliar with stroke and

also for caregivers and loved ones. It can sig-

aphasia to understand what’s happening in the brain of a

nificantly improve quality of life. When people

stroke patient. As they struggle to communicate, are we wit-

come to the hospital, they don’t have any

nessing a cognitive problem or a retrieval problem?

previous experience with this. They have a lot of

That’s a great question. The chief complaint that we get from
people with aphasia is that they know what they want to say;
they just can’t get the words out. A family member or loved

questions, and they need something more than 20
minutes with the neurologist or the speech pathologist.

one will say, “Well, he’s lost his memory.” No, he can remember

Now, for people with a lot of potential, we want to put

that this is a magazine or that’s a chair. He just can’t remem-

our resources toward therapy — one-on-one therapy —

ber the word for magazine or for chair. In most people those

because it could make the difference between having to

words are still intact, the person just cannot pull them out. So

live in a nursing home or getting discharged and living at

it’s more of a retrieval problem than a capacity problem. Hav-

home. It could make the difference between staying at

ing said that, there are people who have lost the words, but

home or going back to work or back to school.

those people are fewer than the people who still have them.
At the risk of oversimplifying your research, is the basic idea
to try to get the part of the brain that is normally used
for comprehension to take over for the part that has been
damaged?
That’s a really tough one. This has been debated for about 150
years, since that first case that described speech impairment
as related to left frontal lobe damage. Some people think that

Fall 2016 / 15

Book Corner

SALE
FOR

16 / Breakthrough

BUYING A BRIDE
A closer look at the matrimonial practice that helped
build the United States

M

any argue that, without marriage, there could be
no stable family units, no children and no future.
And without mail-order brides, one could argue,
there might not be a United States of America. “The entire
colonial endeavor hinged on marriage,” says University of
South Carolina law professor Marcia Yablon-Zug, whose new
book, “Buying a Bride: An Engaging History of Mail-Order
Matches,” traces the phenomenon as far back as our nation’s
first permanent English settlement, Jamestown.
Zug explains that mail-order brides were brought to the
colonies with the express purpose of growing the population
and ensuring the survival of the settlements. Because of that,
she believes these women were heroes and should be remembered as such in American history.
“They were taking incredible risks, and as a result, the
country reaped great benefits,” she says.
Certainly, the overwhelming perception of mail-order
brides doesn’t reflect this attitude, and Zug admits it wasn’t
her perception either when she first started looking into the
topic.
“When I began researching this book, I thought I
would discover that mail-order marriage was bad and had
always been bad, but it turns out more often than not to
be beneficial and even empowering for women,” says Zug,
whose legal research focuses on the intersection of family
law and immigration law.

Today, the mail-order marriage industry continues to
thrive, but perhaps for slightly different reasons. In recent
years, American women have experienced significant improvements in their educational and financial prospects. During this
same period, the prospects for many middle- and working-class
men have stagnated. As Zug points out, the result of this
disparity is that increasing numbers of men are viewed as
unsuitable partners.
“With dwindling local marriage prospects, many of these
rejected men consider mail-order marriages,” says Zug. “What
interests me most is the women they are marrying are the same
kind of women who are rejecting them here. Most of these
women are doctors, lawyers,
accountants — and most of
them want to work. They
expect to. The difference is
they also expect to be wives
first.”
Overall, Zug believes mailorder marriage is nothing like
the grim stereotype prevalent
in today’s culture. In her book,
she argues that the practice has
actually improved the lives of
many of these women — and
the men they marry.

“Buying a Bride: An Engaging History of Mail-Order Matches” is published through New York University Press.

Fall 2016 / 17

A HEALTHY
NEW START
International health expert launches Carolina
Survivors Clinic and a ‘garden of healing’

T

he School of Medicine recently recruited an international health expert from Queens, N.Y., Dr. Rajeev
Bais, who says that one path to expanding the school’s
global mission leads right back to Columbia.
“You really don’t need to go abroad to start a global health
initiative,” Bais says. “We have global health right here in our
backyard. All of the problems of the world, both politically and
health-wise, are manifested in these patients.”
The patients he’s talking about are refugees who have
been settled in S.C. Columbia itself has about a thousand
international refugees or asylum seekers, he says. And they’ve
been through a lot.
“Refugees are probably the most vulnerable people in the
world,” Bais says. “There’s nobody who has gone through more
trauma and witnessed the worst that humanity has to offer than
a refugee.”
Many have endured suffering that most Americans can
hardly imagine.
“There is one girl whose father was murdered, whose mom
was raped. Her sisters were raped and she was raped, and this
was not just once, but multiple times,” Bais says. “All of her
sisters got pregnant from rapes. She got pregnant and had a
kid, and then she found out she was HIV-positive. And this
is a 17-year-old girl. Can you imagine?”
Since arriving in Columbia in September, Bais has opened
the Carolina Survivors Clinic, an outreach program originally
focused on victims of torture and human rights abuse. But
seeing the dearth of medical and psychological services
dedicated to refugees in the area, the team decided to expand
their services to all comers among refugees.

18 / Breakthrough

Physicians are skilled at treating the body, but often
there are injuries that they can’t see, Bais says. The refugees
come from war-torn areas, where witnessing horrific events
is common and torture is prevalent.
“When refugees arrive here, they get a screening exam,
and they look for medical problems like tuberculosis, syphilis,
intestinal parasites and that sort of thing,” Bais says. “But
what they don’t screen for, and they should, is torture. So
we decided to do the health screenings also and look for
[evidence of ] torture and other things in a more comprehensive way.”
Beyond the physical and psychological prescriptions that
modern medicine can offer, the Carolina Survivors Clinic is
building an outreach program that brings refugees in touch
with a surrounding community that Bais has found can be
eager to find out about their lives. The team has worked with
the Sustainable Carolina Farm & Gardens, managed by the
university’s Office of Sustainability, to develop a garden where
refugees can grow foods that remind them of their faraway
homes. It helps draw out older refugees who can get isolated,
Bais says, and the students in the residence hall are often
touched by their stories and eager to learn about their lives
and culture.
The team is currently trying to develop a scholastic soccer
program for kids. It involves after-school tutoring followed
by soccer instruction, with the hope that down the road there
might be academic or athletic scholarships for children of
refugees.
They’re also working with the public library system to
provide English conversation classes. The model is a program
Bais became familiar with while he was completing a fellowship in Lexington, Ky., and involves bringing people from the
community into conversations with refugees. Friendships
often develop, with learning both ways, he says. Many
Americans are struck by the positive outlook of folks who
have been through so much.
“That’s the amazing thing: the resilience,” Bais says.
“Obviously it’s a spectrum, and some people have a very hard
time, especially if they’ve lost children. But most people, they
look to start a new life, to work to become part of the community. They have a lot of hope for the future.”

(above) This unique species of cucumber, native to Africa, is called a “jelly cucumber” or
Kiwano horned cucumber and was grown by one of the Carolina Survivor Garden’s participants; (below) a young papaya tree takes root in one of the garden boxes adjacent to the
Green Quad

Allison Marsh

Fall 2016 / 19

20 / Breakthrough

THE ART OF SCIENCE

CEREBRAL PERSPECTIVE
Several years ago, Dawn Hunter stumbled upon the
medical drawings of 19th century Spanish neuroscientist
Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Since then, her artwork has taken
a completely new turn. Where the associate professor of
studio art once focused on representations of gender in
mass media, now she is digging deep into Cajal, who won
a Nobel Prize in 1906 and is best known for his work on
the structure of the brain. Hunter’s artwork, along with a
presentation she gave last fall at the National Institutes of
Health, is helping to expand conceptions about Cajal’s life
and his work. Hunter wants people to know about how his
childhood affected his outlook, and that his drawings not
only have scientific merit, but also are works of art in their
own right. In her recent work, Hunter has illustrated themes
from Cajal’s life as well as studied his drawings and worked
to re-create them. Through her work, she’s also helping
neuroscientists learn more about one of
their own field’s pioneers.

“Cajal among Dragon Birds” (ink and pen on paper) explores the
juxtaposition of symbolism and Cajal’s neural drawings.

Fall 2016 / 21

RECOGNIZING
HOMELESSNESS
Psychologist Bret Kloos is well known in Columbia as a bridge connecting the university to the
community with regard to efforts to address homelessness. The initiatives and partnerships he
has established have helped build the foundation for a more holistic, data-driven approach to the
issue locally. Recently, Kloos and two doctoral candidates were commissioned by local nonprofit
Homeless No More to survey the local landscape of family homelessness. The result is the 54-page
report â&#x20AC;&#x153;Family Homelessness in Richland County.â&#x20AC;? Following are some findings of that report.

4,113

The number of people who used family homeless services in
Richland County between 2004 and 2015.

81.8%

The percentage of those who used family homeless services
only once between 2004 and 2015.

4%

The percentage of those who used family homeless services
three or more times between 2004 and 2015.

19 :1

Ratio of estimated demand for emergency shelter to supply.

10:1

Ratio of estimated demand for affordable housing to supply.

22 / Breakthrough

EN

Energy

REWIRING THE CARIBBEAN
For the past year, economic geographer Conor Harrison has
been working on a puzzle: Why aren’t Caribbean countries
moving more quickly to adopt renewable energy?
On the surface, the case for change is clear, even without
the obvious concern of climate change and sea-level rise. For
starters, Caribbean countries pay a lot for their electricity
— about three times as much as in the United States.
Secondly, these countries have an abundance of solar, wind
and geothermal power potential. Lastly, there is a wide
network of international development organizations, including
the World Bank, that is pushing the transition to renewables.
And yet, “So far not much has happened — so something
is not working,” says Harrison, an assistant professor of
geography.
In search of an answer, Harrison has visited Jamaica,
Grenada, Saint Vincent, Saint Lucia and Dominica and interviewed government officials, utility operators and development specialists. What he’s found are complex answers — and
underlying assumptions that don’t always fit the context of
the Caribbean energy market.
The trend right now is unbundling, a process of deregulating monopolies that is supposed to lead to private investment
in renewable energy projects. To jumpstart the process,
development groups are offering loan guarantees. “So there is
all this money circulating, but it’s all based on this ideology
that there will be competition,” Harrison says.
The problem is that Caribbean countries are small, and so
are their energy projects.
“A lot of big companies that do this sort of thing around
the world look at this and say, ‘Do I want to do a 1-megawatt
solar installation in the Caribbean, where there’s all kinds of

risk involved?’” Harrison asks rhetorically. “‘Or do I want to
do it in South Carolina where it’s a 10-megawatt project and
it’s going to be done just like that?’”
The Caribbean brings with it other challenges, too —
hurricanes, lack of infrastructure, salt corrosion. Transmission
and distribution costs are high because of difficult terrain and
power grids that are not interconnected. Harrison mentions a
company that had to undertake a major road-widening project
just to get a turbine up to a mountain ridge, and another that
had to transport a crane from one island to another.
Harrison’s current research project has brought him into
an entirely new realm from his previous work, in which he
examined how Jim Crow segregation affected electric utilities
in North Carolina. The Caribbean wasn’t where he expected
to go next, but the opportunity came along when an economic
geographer at East Carolina University invited Harrison to
join him. “I knew the energy stuff and very little about the
Caribbean, and he knew the Caribbean and not much about
energy,” Harrison says.
At this stage, Harrison is not ready to give policy recommendations. Instead, he’s planning to write a series of papers
laying out exactly what’s going on — who the players are, what
the challenges are and how these utility markets came to be the
way they are. Still, he’s hopeful that the ingenuity and resilience
of the people he’s met, along with diligent academic efforts to
understand the region’s particular challenges, will eventually
help Caribbean countries move in the right direction.
“One of the things that’s really inspiring to me is when you
see how clever and smart everyday people can be in challenging circumstances — how people are able to make things work,”
he says.

Fall 2016 / 23

In the Pipeline

READY FOR TAKEOFF
Center for Predictive Maintenance launches new chapter

One of USC’s most successful homegrown research programs now has a new
name and a new commercial partner
and will soon move to a new building.
The College of Engineering
and Computing’s Condition-Based
Maintenance program is now the
Center for Predictive Maintenance,
and the research group will move into
a 30,000-square-foot space on Catawba
Street late next spring. The facility
upgrade will accommodate a dramatically expanded mission.
Moving from the CBM’s orginal focus
on developing cutting-edge military helicopter maintenance protocols, the CPM
will now offer training and education in
aerospace, aviation, automotive and heavy
industries, gas, oil, chemical refining,
nuclear power and water resources.
Center director Abdel Bayoumi,
who came to USC to chair the
Department of Mechanical
Engineering and direct the
newly organized CBM
program in 1998, says the
center was focused on
refining what has proven
to be a highly effective tool.
Working closely with the S.C.
Army National Guard, Bayoumi’s team
has developed a health-monitoring system
for helicopters that annually saves the
U.S. Army millions of dollars. Installing
sensors in an AH-64 Apache airframe
24 / Breakthrough

and analyzing data in an advanced tail
rotor drivetrain test facility, the research
group developed insights into the
aircraft’s mechanical operation.
USC engineers have refined their
knowledge into a condition-based
approach to maintenance, one that
they’ve applied to other rotorcraft in
the Army’s fleet. Their approach monitors
and replaces parts when needed, rather
than on a rigid schedule that sometimes
calls for removing parts with significant
service life remaining but which might
also fail to replace parts on the verge of
premature failure. The schedule-based
approach can lead to fatalities; Bayoumi
cites military researchers who confirm
that soldiers’ lives have been saved
because of USC’s innovations in the field.
The CBM program has the highest
return on investment, 20:1, of any Armyfunded project, Bayoumi adds. And he
believes one key to the program’s success
is the close relationship between the
researchers and the people who benefit
the most from their work.
“What made it successful is that
when you get results, you can share
it immediately with the crew chief,
the maintenance team and the pilot,”
Bayoumi says. “Then they implement
it and can come right back and say,
‘Yeah, we’re happy with this.’”
The center plans to spread
that approach into new industries.

“Condition-based maintenance was a
tool, and predictive maintenance is a culture that will encapsulate a value-added,
cost-benefit analysis,” Bayoumi says.
Aviation, aerospace, automotive and
similar industries involve innumerable
gears, bearings and shafts that are still
being replaced on costly time-based
schedules. Petroleum, refining, chemical
processing, energy and related industries
rely on control valves, all of which stand
to gain from health monitoring to reduce
down-time and replacement costs.
The water purification and desalination industries are experiencing enormous
growth worldwide, Bayoumi says, and
they involve pumps and valves for which
predictive maintenance should prove
highly beneficial.
University partner IBM is part of the
mix, providing software that will organize
the prodigious quantities of data collected
by sensors and help researchers develop
predictive maintenance algorithms that
allow factories and operations to operate
at peak efficiency.
When the new facility opens, the
research team will have demonstration
and classroom space for training, certifications and short courses needed to help
propagate the predictive maintenance
culture. And they have a lot to offer.
“This is totally unique,” Bayoumi
says. “There is no other program like
this one in the United States.”

MORE THAN $250 MILLION IN TOTAL AWARDS FOR 2016

$160.8

Federal

$77.8

Private

$11.5

Award Dollars by Source
In Millions

Award Dollars by Purpose
In Millions
9%

State/Local

Research

$146.8

Service

$80.3

Training

$23.0

31%
32%
5%

59%

64%

Major Funding Sources
In Millions
$53.1

Health and Human Services (excl. NIH)
$46.0

National Institutes of Health
$18.7

National Science Foundation
$10.1

Department of Energy
$8.4

Department of Education
$3.7

Department of Defense

ANOTHER RECORD-SETTING YEAR FOR RESEARCH
AND SPONSORED AWARD FUNDING!
The Office of the Vice President for Research is pleased to congratulate our outstanding faculty for breaking two funding records in fiscal year 2016.
• Total research and sponsored awards reached $250.1 million, USC’s highest total
ever. This represents a 3 percent increase over FY2015’s $242.8 million, which had
previously been the record high.
• Federal awards totaled $160.8 million, the third record-breaking federal funding
level in as many years.
Read more about this exciting milestone at sc.edu/vpresearch, in the news section.

Fall 2016 / 25

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Columbia, SC 29208

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We make South Carolina healthier.
Most of us assume the water where we live, work and play is safe.
Catherine Heigel and the agency she leads make it their business
to ensure that’s the case. She’s leading DHEC’s efforts to enforce
drinking water standards and improve recreational water quality
across the state, keeping South Carolinians and their communities
healthy and vibrant.